1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the aerospace industry and, in particular, to the substantiation of aircraft performance in aircraft design, configuration, and operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the fields of aircraft design, manufacturing, and operation, aircraft performance substantiation is conducted to provide a quantification of aircraft performance with respect to critical performance properties. Aircraft performance substantiation can provide such a quantification in a report to be used by, for example, aircraft designers, manufacturers, customers, and operators to certify, for example, that the aircraft can satisfactorily perform a desired maneuver or series of maneuvers or whether an aircraft can satisfactorily achieve a desired mission. Legacy presentation of an aircraft performance substantiation report included approximately 700 pages of aircraft performance substantiation data. Those intending to use such a report were required to identify aircraft performance substantiation data of interest and sift through pages of data to locate such aircraft performance substantiation data of interest. For example, a user accessing an aircraft performance substantiation report to determine whether an aircraft could safely or satisfactorily perform takeoff under particular conditions or assumptions would have had to identify each of several performance variables relevant to the maneuver of takeoff (e.g., rotation speed, flap settings, distance-to-speed, etc.), identify each of several conditions or assumptions relevant to each of the performance variables (e.g., weight, centers of gravity, moments of inertia), and manually interpolate or extrapolate the performance properties for such performance variables with respect to each of the particular conditions or assumptions. Accessing an aircraft performance substantiation report for several performance variables and several conditions or assumptions was time-consuming and was prone to error depending whether the user had correctly identified the relevant performance variables and conditions or assumptions. Accessing an aircraft performance substantiation report in such manner also required that the user undertake a series of manual references to data tables, which complicated the user's ability to change the operative conditions or assumptions in determining the aircraft performance properties. Furthermore, to the extent that the mass properties of an aircraft, such as the centers of gravity and moments of inertia, would be included in the relevant conditions or assumptions, the user was required to perform a series of preliminary calculations based on the loading of the aircraft to determine the mass properties, which can become increasingly complex for aircraft with complex configurations, such as, for example, military aircraft, which have multiple loading stations, multiple loads available to load at the loading stations, and multiple desired configurations depending on the aircraft's mission. The art, however, has not provided an interactive aircraft performance substantiation solution wherein a customer or user can input or select key conditions or assumptions to efficiently and interactively obtain aircraft performance properties of interest with respect to preselected maneuvers and user-configurable conditions and assumptions.